The communications market is moving en mass to open standards, be it communication protocols, application frameworks, or industry standard hardware platforms. This is designed to facilitate mass deployment and interoperability, essentially providing freedom to market and deployment of devices and/or software that will work with any service providers, any applications, and/or any hardware. Through these open standards, the days of designing a proprietary product to work specifically with a single service provider, i.e. a device/service provider partnership, are dwindling.
As an example of this, it has become common place to deploy third party devices as part of end-to-end communication solutions. These devices use open standard based protocols to communicate with a private branch exchange platform to obtain call services. Unfortunately, much of the service provider private branch exchange functionality is “lost”, as the ability to control the device is limited, and therefore providing feature rich services, including basics such as transfer or conference, is difficult. Moreover, in an effort to attract more customers, service providers are offering more and more feature rich calling abilities, but these are not always known or accessible by the device, effectively limiting its usefulness.
There are two solutions available today that would allow the device user to access the available features from the service provider. The first requires the use of a feature access code entered from the keypad. The use of DTMF codes to invoke features is rather old fashioned and places the burden on the user to remember these codes. Given that the codes can change from provider to provider, the user must also know which network they are on at any given time. They also need to know in what situation each code is valid. The second solution was created by device manufacturers to allow service providers to tailor the device to their network. This involves tools that can be used to modify device menus within the device software to match the features available in the service provider network. These menus can just encapsulate the DTMF feature access codes or communicate out-of-band to signal the feature to the service provider. While this does serve to abstract the user from having to remember code, changes to these access codes, including additions and deletions of features, requires rework to all devices on the network. This solution allows the device manufacture to more easily inter-operate with multiple service providers provided they support the same feature set. If there are differences the device manufacturer modifies the menus resulting in creating a look, feel, and behavior specific to only one provider, and hence the phone becomes “locked” to that provider, and is not usable on other provider networks.
Many of the solutions that offer such configuration tools to modify or create menu templates only provide for inserting the feature access codes as speed dials. This limits the ability to enter random information, for example, call forwarding, which requires a directory number afterwards that cannot be known at the time the menu template is created. Some interfaces have advanced over time to offer an input selection, but this is by no means standard.
When a user of a mobile device is considered, they can access, or have the opportunity to access, several different networks each day (PSTN/mobile, Internet/Intranet), and using a variety of transmission mediums (cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth). The features available on these networks can vary, or be offered simultaneously, but the users' menus are static and designed specifically with a single provider in mind. A need therefore exists for a system and method that allows features and content to be dynamically downloaded to a device using open communication protocols. The present application addresses the above-described concerns encountered in a device/server relationship and provides other, related advantages.